By Jeff Kallman of SportsCritics.com

July 31, 2006 "Just keep loving old Buck," Buck O'Neil said, a few months earlier, when the latest round of pre-Robinson black players and pioneers was selected for the Hall of Fame and he wasn't among them. Come Sunday afternoon at the Cooperstown podium O'Neil demonstrated perfectly why his request requires no effort to satisfy---and why a group of high school students and their teacher launched a cross-country bicycle trek in a bid to stir support enough to enshrine O'Neil himself.

The induction could have had no better leadoff man than O'Neil, never mind no better closer than Bruce Sutter. O'Neil stood before the Cooperstown audience an old man with a young heart. Sutter stood as a middle-aged man with a swollen heart. O'Neil spoke of an absence of hate and got the crowd and the Hall of Famers to lock hands and sing of love, representing the seventeen black inductees with his usual meld of dignity and delight. Sutter spoke through choking emotions no matter how relaxed Ozzie Smith and Johnny Bench made him, their fake gray beards exaggerating his own very real one as they presented him formally.

"[T]hey always said to me, ‘Buck, I know you hate people for what they did to you or what they did to your folks.' I said no, man, I never learned to hate," O'Neil crooned. Not people, anyway. "I hate cancer. Cancer killed my mother. My wife died 10 years ago of cancer---I'm single, ladies." Arched brows and laughter. "I hate AIDS. A good friend of mine died of AIDS three months ago. I hate AIDS. But I can't hate a human being because my God never made anything ugly. Now, you can be ugly if you want to, boy, but God didn't make you that way. So I want you to light this valley up this afternoon."

Sutter lit up the memory of his parents, his high school coaches, and at least one incumbent Hall of Famer unable to resist a subversive grin. "The point [my father] always got across was that the game of baseball is perfect, but the people that play it are not," said the man who nailed the St. Louis Cardinals' last World Series ring to date. He credited Donegal High School coaches Don Staley and Al Brooks for teaching him punctuality, practice, and one more key.

So vivid was the heart on Sutter's sleeve that he delivered the day's best punch line and it went practically unmolested. "Never make the same mistake twice, which I learned later on in life the hard way," Sutter intoned. Then he paused, just as he did from the stretch before striking out Gorman Thomas to end the 1982 World Series. "Mr. Sandberg helped me with that." For perhaps the first time, Sutter let himself see the objective incandescence of that June 1984 afternoon, when Ryne Sandberg sent two of his late-inning offerings, one in extra innings, into the left field bleachers of a sunbathed Wrigley Field.

He nearly spilled it over when he acknowledged his wife, Jamye, and alluded without specifying to the surgery she faces a fortnight hence, the target a cancerous kidney. "I know we have some challenges to face in our future, but we'll do them as we always do, together."

Both O'Neil and Sutter seemed to want their audience more than themselves wrapped in the day's glory. But it came naturally to O'Neil while Sutter fought his lately overtaxed heart. On the mound Sutter had bristled with unpretentious confidence. He sounded most sure of himself when recognizing the late coach Fred Martin, who taught him the fateful pitch; or, upholding teammates' achievements, thanking his St. Louis manager Whitey Herzog, and thanking his elder St. Louis teammate Jim Kaat.

Then the ceremonies ended, O'Neil and Sutter accepting the welcomes of the Hall of Famers present, O'Neil embracing and reviewing with Monte Irvin, Sutter accepting a round of embraces and handshakes including a handsomely photographed shake from Sandy Koufax. Time has been kind to Koufax. The youngest-enshrined Hall of Famer (he was 36 when he was inducted) is now one of the three longest-serving living Hall of Famers (Bob Feller went in a decade before Koufax stepped in with Yogi Berra). At 70 Koufax wears his age with gentle dignity.

In between, Houston Astros broadcaster emeritus Gene Elston spoke soberly, looking and sounding aged in grace, retrofitting the bombshell that provoked the Negro Leagues' honours in Cooperstown in the first place, quoting chapter and verse from Ted Williams's 1966 induction speech surprise. ("Baseball gives every boy in America a chance to excel," Teddy Ballgame had pronounced, with fellow inductee Casey Stengel at his side. "This is the nature of man and the name of the game. Some day I hope Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson will be voted into the Hall of Fame as symbols of the great negro players who are not yet here only because they weren't given the chance." He got his wish and then some.)

Rocky Mountain News columnist Tracy Ringolsby spoke gratefully entering the writers' wing. "When I would hear Don [Baylor] talk about the situations he grew up with and faced in Austin, Texas . . . it made me realize how lucky I was to be born and bred in a place that's a little bit naive about life called Wyoming," Ringolsby said beneath his trademark cowboy hat. "It's where you kind of learn to grow up and judge people by who they are and not what they are or what they can do for you."

Sharon Robinson, daughter of Jackie, gave a calmly stirring address thanking baseball for continuing to redress the inequity that denied most of the best of the Negro Leaguers their chance in the Show. "With the crumbling of the invisible wall of segregation, baseball was ahead of the civil rights movement," she reminded the audience, speaking with the kind of gentle firmness that characterized her father's manner, after Father Time caught up to him following ten major league seasons.

The seventeen Negro League/pre-Negro League inductees, none of whom lived to see the day, deserved similar dignity and maybe more, and they got it from everyone except, perhaps, ESPN Classic. The network telecasting the ceremonies obstructed two of the most important men in Negro Leagues history when their plaques were read and their representatives (mostly family descendants) accepted their overdue honours.

ESPN Classic cut to a commercial during Biz Mackey's induction. Fine way to let viewers learn or remember that Mackey---a top-of-the-line catcher before becoming a top-of-the-line manager (for a Newark Eagles championship team) whom two of his players, Don Newcombe and Roy Campanella, credited with making them major league ready enough to become two keys to the Brooklyn Dodgers' Boys of Summer teams of 1949-56.

Cum Posey could have been called the John T. Brush of the Negro Leagues; his Homestead Grays were close enough to the Negro Leagues' answer to the Brush-McGraw New York Giants. Two ESPN Classic commentators and a Kent State University historian (Leslie Heaphy, one of the team whose work led to these Negro League/pre-Negro League inductions) kept yapping it up during the reading of Posey's plaque.

At least they left Effa Manley's induction unmolested, Manley being the first woman to enter Cooperstown as a full Hall of Famer, via her ownership and operation of the Newark Eagles. Appropriate, especially considering that Manley had done something too often uncommon among even major league owners: she treated her players like men and her men like her sons.

They also left unmolested J.L. Wilkinson, whose Kansas City Monarchs a) sent more players to the Show (including Jackie Robinson and Satchel Paige) than any other Negro Leagues franchise, when all was said and done, b) could have been called, arguably, the Negro Leagues' answer to the Jacob Ruppert Yankees. A neat if slightly grotesque irony, that, considering the manner in which a later Yankee ownership would use the Kansas City Athletics (whose sale from the Mack family to Yankee crony Arnold Johnson that generation of Yankees brokered) as a virtual farm team-cum-finishing school in the 1950s.

It wouldn't have killed a real baseball audience if ESPN Classic had just let the induction of the full Negro League/pre-Negro League inductions be. No breaks, no commentators' interruptions. History sometimes deserves to speak for itself, even if it speaks only through the sweetly swollen pride of descendants accepting the overdue for people who didn't live to see that their effort did not live unappreciated forever. Maybe we were lucky ESPN Classic let us be reminded of the first black man to dial nine in the American League. (Willard [Home Run] Brown, the longtime Kansas City Monarchs slugger, sipping a cup of coffee with the 1947 St. Louis Browns.)

They were honoured on a day baseball could have called a Hall of Fame day out at the ballparks and beyond. Willie Mays played hooky from the Hall of Fame with good cause: he spent the day at the White House Tee Ball game. The New York Mets had completed an unmistakeable statement in Atlanta and the day had only begun with Carlos Beltran tying two major league records with one gracefully ferocious grand slam swing. The Los Angeles Angels treated Curt Schilling like a penny in Fenway and it only began with three Monster shots in the third inning, and the sometimes shaky Angels showed they could still play up with the big men on the block. Milton Bradley's walkoff three-run bomb made it three of four for Oakland against Toronto and secured the Athletics a half game ahead of the Angels in the American League West. The Tigers held fast enough to their American League Central surprise, winning two of three from the otherwise-resurgent Minnesota Twins; the Empire Emeritus took two of three from Tampa Bay while dropping a non-waiver trade deadline bomb (landing Bobby Abreu from Philadelphia) and staying within a half game of the Olde Towne Team. And the left-for-dead Los Angeles Dodgers landed a live third base comer (Wilson Betemit, from the Braves) while using the Washington Nationals as a possible reviver in a surprising weekend sweep.

The game remained perfect. The people who televised its highest annual honours did not.